How Your Beauty Routine Can Help the Environment

Our Earth provides us with the nutrients and energy we need to live happy and healthy lives, all of the amazing ingredients in our natural skin care, and a beautiful place for us to live and enjoy. Help us protect our beautiful Earth with these 5 ways to stay green and clean with your daily routine.

It’s no secret that beauty products- skin care and makeup have a long history of bad practices. Animal testing has been around since the 1930s, though recent years have thankfully given rise to an abandonment of this practice. But just because animal testing is the most well known bad practice in beauty doesn’t mean it’s the only one. Microbeads in your scrubs? Running the water while your face mask sets? Plastic containers going in the trash? No, no, and no. Here’s how to green your beauty routine.

See the symbols

120 billion units of packaging are made annually in the cosmetics industry. An easy way to not be a part of the problem? Look for the recycling symbol on the bottom of your plastic-packaged products and learn the difference between the kinds of plastic you’re recycling. For example, Plastic 1 and 2 are the most common types of plastic. You can also recycle products that don’t come in plastic, like cardboard boxes your products are shipped in. Better yet, reuse the boxes yourself.

Speed things up

Not everyone is lucky enough to have fresh water to shower, bathe, and rinse of their face masks with. In fact, only 2 percent of the world is fresh-water, and showers and baths account for the most use of water in the US. A simple but easy solution is to just run the water for less time. Even just paying attention to how much water you’re running can teach you so much about how much water you could be saving. I’ve heard of some people who even turn off the water when they apply shampoo or soap and only turn the water back on to rinse it off. No need to be that extreme (unless you want to!), but maybe next time you’re just letting the water run and run while you finish making lunch for tomorrow, you’ll think about speeding things up a bit.

Do your research

Plenty of scientific studies have proven harmful chemicals and parabens to be a no-no in beauty products. The products are not just bad for you but they can be ingested by animals when products make it into our waterways. But still, they’re in so many things! At LimeLife cruelty-free and paraben-free. You can see all of the ingredients on our site at any time. We urge you to pay more attention to your products, understanding what’s in them, how it affects the environment and how it affects you, too!

Look for refill programs

We provide refills of our eyeshadows that come in recyclable plastic for all of our cosmetic pans. Every time one is purchased we make a donation to our Brighter Together Foundation. To take our mission further, we have officially partnered with Terracycle to create a free recycling program for LimeLife by Alcone skincare and cosmetics packaging in the US. Participating is simple:

1 Go to www.terracycle.com, create a profile, and sign up for the LimeLife by Alcone Recycling Program.

3 Once your box is full, download a free shipping label from the program web page, affix the label to the box, and send it in to TerraCycle for recycling!

Once collected, the waste is broken down and separated by material, because the science of recycling is focused on recovering the materials that an object is made of. Therefore each waste stream is recycled according to its own process. Plastics are cleaned and pelletized, whereas metals are melted down. For example, recycling beauty products packaging involves shredding it, separating the materials that it was made from, then melting those materials into raw materials that can be then used to make new recycled products. Click here to learn more!

Ask for more

If you’re not happy with the practices and packaging of some of your favorite products, tell the company! You never know when something you say could change the game forever. We at LimeLife, for one, are always interested in hearing how we can better take care of our Mother Earth.